Like I said in my introduction post, I am also one of the many poor souls who wants Star Ocean Blue Sphere translated into English, so here's a screenshot that is essentially a collage of the work that I've pulled up so far:

Now, I looked at the French and Chinese translations that have been successfully completed 100%. It seems the French translation seems to have replaced the font table at address 000F4000, but the Chinese translation did not touch it. Rather, the Chinese translation started their work at 0008C000 and put their own font table there. They were able to make room, as another translator, Mz, had mentioned in an earlier post.

So far, I have used SearchR3 to find the use of "star ocean" and then I made my English font table from there. So far, so good for a newbie like me ! I double-checked that these locations were correct, and lucky me! I can now make a full table file for the entire Japanese script, and be able to manually translate it. Not very efficient, but given the current shenanigans mentioned by Mz, I might as well dig deeper into this rabbit hole. With a working table file, Hexecute can finally stop giving me garbage, and give me actual text instead of the occasional Kanji, random number/letter or two.

If you would like to give me advice, or perhaps stop me from reinventing the wheel , please do respond!

Being a layman, I have no advice that would benefit you. The only one that has released anything is lokai20. I believe he's done with his second attempt after his original progress died with his hard drive and mz's possible progress. His last video was anticipating passing on what he had to others. But he was translating as he went, as opposed to mz and Aeon Genesis/Gideon Zhi who seem to each have a completed translation. Until there's some collaboration, you might have to just reinvent that wheel.

From one dude dropping his thumb drive down a street stream in the rain, to a hard drive failure with BOTH projects combined (gonna have to ask about that, after I have definitive evidence of my translation effort), and I thought Aeon Genesis' 100% announcement was referring to Mz's work but I guess he did that, too. Thanks for letting me know about their works, but I am already VERY aware of pretty much every single post and video they've made, so it's not really news to me. This game sure is cursed!

So if I DO have to reinvent the wheel, I'll just have to be a SmartyTM and actually back up my work, regardless of whether it's on a solid state drive (which it is) or not lmao. It's 2017, and there was definitive proof that we could've translated this gameboy color RPG years ago, and even within this year too! I'll just have to break the curse once for all. But, college is coming around the corner, so I'll have some update on my progress ready despite that time delay.

SE could make a remake of this game and release it before that the originalgame stay translated in english xdddAll star ocean games seems hard to be translated, I tried to make something with SO2 to spanish, but nothing.

Oh yes, I looked at the cell phone remake. Too bad I can't get my hands on it. But nevermind that, it's more likely that Square Enix has moved on to greener pastures (i.e. making Final Fantasy their billion-dollar cash cow )

Helloooo, I'm back. I got college out of the way, so I'm restarting this lost cause.

I'm looking at the French translation right now, and even though I hear that, and I quote, "The French translation is a huge piece of shit. They made up 99% of the text, and it's not properly hacked, so the ROM space they had was minuscule. Avoid it like the plague." Thanks, Mz.

I'm looking at these screenshots on the homepage here: https://sites.google.com/site/sobstrad/home , and translating them, and they seem to check out so, I'll double check and see if the stuff is actually a garbage fire or not.

Honestly, I'm just gonna go off the French translation and put it into English, since French is a lot easier to translate than Japanese, lol! If it really is bogus, then I'm back at square one, no biggie.

My translation was completely finished almost a year and a half ago, but it's garbage too (at least I would call it a translation...) and it has some bugs that I'm not interested at all in fixing at the moment.

In any case, I offered all the help I could bring to anyone interested in re-translating it (or translating it to other languages), but I've only received many messages just asking me to send them my translation and none asking for help to (re-)translate.

In short: no, I'll never release this translation. If no one else ever translates this game (unlikely), I'd like to translate everything from scratch and program a VWF instead of this 4x8 font.

If anyone is interested in my tools (or their source code) or my extremely shitty translation to translate it to another language, feel free to ask. I would only send them to someone I could trust, and someone who can show some decent language skills (that is, if you consider the French "translation" a good one, don't even bother messaging me. Sorry about that.)

Yeah, this has been on my to-post queue for the last month or two, but it's kind of languished behind the Masoukishin releases. I've been trying to make a post at least once a week, usually on a Monday or Tuesday, and this happened to be this week's. (There are only three left; one's an announcement, one's progress that I want new screenshots for, and one's, well, you'll see.)

None of my work is actually based on the French version; the 4x8 font in my screenshots is actually done programmatically (though it might be the same graphics as the french one, idk). I held out for a vwf from other people for *years* and at this point I'd rather just have the 4x8 and something releasable than nothing at all, and I'm not confident enough in my z80 skill to write an actual vwf.

It's still a good ways off though, and I'm probably a few months away from being able to devote any meaningful time to it.

None of my work is actually based on the French version; the 4x8 font in my screenshots is actually done programmatically (though it might be the same graphics as the french one, idk). I held out for a vwf from other people for *years* and at this point I'd rather just have the 4x8 and something releasable than nothing at all, and I'm not confident enough in my z80 skill to write an actual vwf.

I see, nice job!

Can you tell us what you've done so far? (Or what's left?)

As I said, I've already fully hacked and (poorly) translated the game, so maybe I can help you with something if you're interested.

Main dialog (and some of the incidental stuff) is translated and inserted. Needs to be edited. Font assembly work for main dialog *should* be done, but that hasn't touched events, battles, or menus.

Unfortunately either the emulator I was using to test was bad (very possible) or some of the scripting got broken during reinsertion. After the intro cutscene plays you end up with a ghost Precis flickering in and out of existence in the corner, and the remainder of the intro event doesn't play as it's supposed to; you can just talk to Dias, pick your party, and leave the ship. I recall this working in an earlier version though, so I'm not sure what happened. I experienced a blackscreen crash in Mile Tower as well.

Haven't touched anything beyond the dialog, though iirc I started documenting the combat text routine. I haven't looked at it much since fall. Masoukishin's text work popped while I was tinkering with this, and that took priority.

Sounds like you still have a *lot* of work ahead of you. To this day I have nightmares of thousands of items, spells, monsters, descriptions, profiles, minigames... Great game, but not really fun to translate.

If you're interested in some PHP files (and a MySQL database) to edit the rest of the game, or even just to use as a reference (if you can manage to read tens of thousands of lines of ugly code written in a few weeks), just let me know.

(I had a lot of crashes along the way too. Most of them were bad pointers within the custom scripting engine of the game, or just bad reverse engineering of some bytecodes, sometimes overwriting other stuff accidentally... A quick look at my code seems to show there are at least 9 different bytecodes that serve as a pointer in one way or another.)

I'll take anything you can offer at this point! Though again there's no immediate rush; I have a few other things on my plate that will fully occupy my time over the next several months, though I do expect to be back on Blue Sphere by fall.

Just how many projects exist on SOBS? I think I still have a rom with a fully working proportional font for most stuff and dialog inserter that works like a charm and allows for event editing (some extra strings are stored in there).

Logged

I am the lord, you all know my name, now. I got it all: cash, money, and fame.

Just how many projects exist on SOBS? I think I still have a rom with a fully working proportional font for most stuff and dialog inserter that works like a charm and allows for event editing (some extra strings are stored in there).

Quite a few, I'd say. At least 5, it seems. I was just organizing the files that I was going to send to Gideon Zhi.

Maybe we could join all our efforts? A VWF from there, a decent translation from there, etc.

I have all June free to work on anything (minus the time it takes to watch the World Cup matches ), so maybe I can help with other stuff too.

This is what I already have: all of the text already located and editable, tested from start to finish, a shitty translation, a shitty "dual-tile" font, all the graphics localized and ready to edit and insert with a single batch (most of them already edited), 31 save files from the very beginning of the game up to the final boss... And maybe other stuff I forgot already.